SOME years ago, while working on a story about the biology of behaviour, I visited a hyena research colony in California. I was quickly charmed by the hyenas, with their big, dark eyes and goofy play habits. I was also charmed by the hyena researchers, who were optimistically pressing the Walt Disney Company to change the sneaking, duplicitous depiction of hyenas in its Lion King movies.
As anyone who's watched those movies knows (as a mother of boys, I have many times), the researchers did not win that campaign. And as evolutionary biologist Marc Bekoff and bioethicist Jessica Pierce note in their eloquently argued book, hyena researchers have not even managed to convince the majority of their own community. When the researchers have tried to publish their work on cooperative hyenas, they've run into trouble, because their peers "were convinced that hyenas simply couldn't behave in such ways".
Wild Justice makes a compelling argument for open-mindedness regarding non-human animals. It also argues that social behaviours such as cooperation provide evidence for a sophisticated animal consciousness.
In particular, the authors propose that other animal species possess empathy, compassion and a sense of justice - in other words, a moral code not unlike our own.Their definition of morality is a strongly Darwinian one. They see moral actions as dictated by the behavioural code of social species, the communal operating instructions that bond a group safely together, the "social glue" of survival. They believe such codes are necessarily species-specific and warn against, for instance, judging wolf morals by the standards of monkeys, dolphins or humans.
Still, a "moral" decision can seem remarkably similar across many species. Bekoff and Pierce make their case by calling on a wide range of animal studies, from field biology to the laboratory and from the anecdotal to the statistical. In one lab study of Diana monkeys, for instance, the animals had to put tokens into a slot to receive their food. When an elderly female couldn't manage hers, a neighbouring male inserted the tokens for her. In a different kind of experiment, rats refused to push a lever for food when they realised their action meant another animal got an electric shock.
Bekoff and Pierce have a larger goal than simply telling nice animal stories or even describing a kind of biological morality. They also hope to persuade readers that humans aren't so different from our fellow voyagers on planet Earth. These moral behaviours, they argue, are evidence of a kind of evolutionary continuity between humans and other species. This, they acknowledge, may be an even harder sell than the notion of a cooperative hyena. "Many people are uncomfortable with the idea of ascribing morality to animals because it seems to threaten the uniqueness of humans," they write.
The authors call for more research into animal morality, and ask us to respect the capabilities of other animals in the meantime. I think they've hit the right note here in trying to further discussion of a provocative thesis. My only complaint is that the book is overly careful. The authors try too hard to keep their conclusions non-threatening. I wish they'd attempted to answer that tricky question that nags at me whenever I study a captive animal. As I stand on the unrestricted side of a fence watching a hyena, and it watches me back with deep, wary eyes, which one of us is really the moral animal?
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227071.400-review-wild-justice-by-mark-bekoff-and-jessica-pierce.html
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